The murder of the century : the Gilded Age crime that scandalized a city and sparked the tabloid wars by Paul Collins(
Book
)12
editions published
between
2011
and
2013
in
English and German
and held by
1,406 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover
a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an
overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are stymied: There are no witnesses,
no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the
era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the
case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets
of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio -- a hard luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor
-- all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented
capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who
the defense claimed wasn't even dead. This book is a rollicking tale -- a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age
and a colorful re creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day. - Jacket flap

The book of William : how Shakespeare's first folio conquered the world by Paul Collins(
Book
)7
editions published
between
2009
and
2010
in
English
and held by
872 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
One book above all others has transfixed connoisseurs for four centuries--a book sold for shillings in the streets of London,
whisked to Manhattan for millions, and stored deep within the vaults of Tokyo. The book: William Shakespeare's First Folio
of 1623. This "travelogue" follows the trail of the Folio's remarkable journey and Shakespeare's cross-cultural future as
Asian buyers enter their Folios into the electronic ether

Blood & ivy : the 1849 murder that scandalized Harvard by Paul Collins(
Book
)4
editions published
between
2018
and
2019
in
English
and held by
689 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
Traces the scandalous murder of a Harvard Medical School graduate and the ensuing trial that riveted mid-nineteenth-century
America, exploring how the case established important precedents in medical forensics and the definition of reasonable doubt

Not even wrong : adventures in autism by Paul Collins(
Book
)7
editions published
between
2004
and
2006
in
English
and held by
643 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
The author, whose son Morgan could read and spell at age three, but not answer to his own name, blends a memoir of his son's
autistic world with an examination of such permanent outsiders and geniuses as Defoe and Swift

The trouble with Tom : the strange afterlife and times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins(
Book
)11
editions published
between
2005
and
2014
in
English
and held by
616 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
Follows the trail of the corpse of the author of "Common Sense," who was shunned as an infidel by the church, buried in an
open field on a New York farm, and whose body was later dug up and moved to Britain years later by a well-meaning admirer
who nevergot around to burying the remains

Edgar Allan Poe : the fever called living by Paul Collins(
Book
)4
editions published
between
2014
and
2019
in
English
and held by
508 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the
most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written
some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling "The Tell-Tale Heart" to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--The
first modern detective story--to the iconic poem "The Raven." Poe's life was one of unremitting hardship. His father abandoned
the family, and his mother died when he was three. Poe was thrown out of West Point, and married his beloved thirteen-year-old
cousin, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. He was so poor that he burned furniture to stay warm. He was a scourge to
other poets, but more so to himself. In the hands of Paul Collins, one of our liveliest historians, this mysteriously conflicted
figure emerges as a genius both driven and undone by his artistic ambitions. Collins illuminates Poe's huge successes and
greatest flop (a 143-page prose poem titled Eureka), and even tracks down what may be Poe's first published fiction, long
hidden under an enigmatic byline. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Edgar Allan Poe is a spellbinding story about the man once hailed
as "the Shakespeare of America."--

The murder of the century : the gilded age crime that scandalized a city & sparked the tabloid wars by Paul Collins(
Recording
)16
editions published
between
2011
and
2012
in
English
and held by
496 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered
a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an
overgrown ditch. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's
most perplexing murder

Edgar A. Poe : buried alive(
Visual
)2
editions published
in
2017
in
English
and held by
439 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
Edgar Allan Poe: buried alive draws on the rich palette of Poe's evocative imagery and sharply drawn plots to tell the real
story of the notorious author. Featuring Tony Award-winning actor Denis O'Hare, the film explores the misrepresentations of
Poe as an alcoholic madman. It reveals the way in which Poe tapped into what it means to be a human in the modern and sometimes
frightening world

Not even wrong : a father's journey into the lost history of autism by Paul Collins(
Book
)8
editions published
between
2005
and
2010
in
Chinese and English
and held by
110 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders.
Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, and beginning to see why he himself has spent a lifetime researching
talented eccentrics, Collins shows how these stories are relevant and even necessary to shed light on autism

Banvard's folly : thirteen tales of people who didn't change the world by Paul Collins(
Book
)3
editions published
between
2001
and
2002
in
English
and held by
88 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities
have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's
Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the
eternally constellated. Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits
of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery,
monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck--or perhaps some combination of them all--leapt straight from life into
thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the
centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells. Collins
brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of
the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and
most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. RenE Blondot was a distinguished
French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender
age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as
a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly
succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth
was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers.
Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine
men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or p0revel
in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to
people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot

The rector and the rogue by W. A Swanberg(
Book
)1
edition published
in
2011
in
English
and held by
27 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
It began quietly enough one morning in February 1880, with a mutton-chopped Acme Safe Company salesman knocking on the door
of Reverend Morgan Dix, the starchiest clergyman in Manhattan's most respectable church. The salesman was surely misdirected,
Reverend Dix explained, he had no need for a safe, and he had not made an appointment. But soon after, used clothes dealers
arrived, followed by heavy machinery salesmen, and soon the street filled riotously with wave after wave of solicitor-tormentors,
hundreds of funeral directors, horse traders, wigmakers, fellow clergymen, doctors, all insisting they'd been summoned by
the bewildered Reverend Dix. And for weeks, it continued in this manner. Reporters from every newspaper in New York camped
out to watch the fun, and as the story gained national attention, police and postal officers raced to capture the gleeful
prankster-cum-performance artist who was making a mockery of the esteemed Trinity Church